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In Zimbabwe, Mugabe Critics Face Beatings

Morgan Tsvangirai, center, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe, in Harare last month with other supporters of the group. He had been severely beaten in a March 11 attack.Credit
Desmond Kwande/Agence France-Press — Getty Images

HARARE, April 5 — Keith Charumbira had just stepped off a minivan taxi in southwest Harare three weeks ago, fresh from a Friday evening gathering of civic advocates in Zimbabwe’s capital city, when he saw the knot of policemen walking toward him. It was too late to flee.

“They started asking questions,” he said. “ ‘Why are you active in an opposition party that is against the needs of the government? Don’t you know you are part of a leadership that is leading to violence?’ ” The officers rifled his pockets, he said, and took his cash, amounting to about $60. Then, for the next 20 minutes, they beat him.

“They used batons,” he said. “My head, my chest, on my legs. I had a head injury.” When the officers tried to tie him up with his own shirt, Mr. Charumbira said, he managed to slip out and run away, fleeing first to a relative’s home, then to a Harare hospital. He spent six days there recovering.

There is nothing subtle about the reaction of President Robert G. Mugabe’s government to the latest surge of political unrest in Zimbabwe. By the scores — by the hundreds, some opposition figures say — people critical of Mr. Mugabe’s rule are being cornered on sidewalks, hauled to jails or simply abducted from their homes in early morning raids, and then savagely beaten.

The main faction of the leading opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change, says that at least 500 of its members have been attacked in the last month. The numbers of attacks on civic advocates and other opposition figures is less clear but appears substantial.

Some of those attacked are left with fractured skulls or broken limbs. A few have been shot. At least one has been killed: a week ago, a 65-year-old former cameraman for the state-controlled Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation was found bludgeoned to death in a field 50 miles from his home in Glenview, a south Harare slum that is a locus of antigovernment sentiment.

[On Friday, a police spokesman in Harare said a murder investigation had been opened in the case.]

The cameraman, Edward Chikombo, was rumored to have sold to foreign broadcasters videotape of a March 11 police assault on antigovernment protesters that sent 50 activists to Harare hospitals. He was abducted from his home on March 29 by a group of armed men driving a 4x4 vehicle, according to the Media Institute of Southern Africa, a regional journalist-rights organization.

That March 11 assault, which seriously injured leaders of the Movement for Democratic Change and other top civic figures, drew worldwide condemnation. Mr. Mugabe’s government appears to have responded with a crackdown that strikes some here as an act of paranoia, if not desperation.

Mr. Mugabe was widely quoted last month as saying that “the police have a right to bash” protesters who resist them, and added that the main leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai, deserved the beating he got on March 11 — leaving him hospitalized with a head wound and possible skull fracture.

An international furor erupted this week after The Herald, a government-controlled newspaper that frequently speaks for officials in power, suggested that one British diplomat that it accused of aiding opposition figures might return to London “in a body bag, like some of her colleagues from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“This is not a regime that is ensconced in the affections of the people,” Iden Wetherell, an editor of the weekly Zimbabwe Independent, said in his downtown offices this week. “There’s a real fear of popular mobilization. Look at the pattern of beating people up, of declaring Harare a zone where no demonstrations can be held, of breaking up news conferences. It’s clearly an attempt to prevent the leadership of the opposition from communicating with its members.”

Civic advocates, opposition figures and human-rights advocates call this a low-intensity war on Mr. Mugabe’s critics that represents a new chapter in the government’s years-long effort to stifle dissent.

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“These abductions cannot happen without the knowledge of senior military chiefs, senior police chiefs and senior intelligence chiefs,” Selvan Chetty, the deputy director of the South Africa-based Solidarity Peace Trust, a human-rights group, said in an interview. “They have to be sanctioned somewhere.”

Precisely who is behind the attacks is often unclear. Some, like Mr. Charumbira, have been attacked by uniformed police officers, and frequently have been imprisoned as well. At least 25 victims of attacks have faced charges in Harare courts in the last week alone, Tafadzwa Mugabe, a lawyer for Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, said in an interview. “Most of these guys are picked up at midnight or the early hours of the morning,” he said. “They’re terribly beaten, and then they’re put in jail.”

But many more beatings and abductions, like that of the cameraman Mr. Chikombo, are anonymous, carried out by men in plainclothes driving unmarked vehicles.

Nelson Chamisa, a member of Zimbabwe’s Parliament and a top official of the main faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, was walking into Harare’s airport terminal on a Sunday morning two weeks ago, bound for a meeting with European Union officials, when he found himself surrounded by eight men in civilian clothes.

“Before I realized what was happening, one of them produced a metal object and hit me in the face,” he said. “I fell to the ground. I was hit with metal objects in my face, my neck, my head, my back. All I can remember is that there was this guy with his foot on my neck. I was bleeding profusely.”

Mr. Chamisa said he was assaulted for at least five minutes as the airport’s police officers stood idly by. The attackers took his carry-on bag, containing a laptop, documents and some $2,000. When a crowd gathered, the men raced to two new Nissan sedans without license plates, fired shots in the air to scatter onlookers, and sped away.

The police have yet to interview him or begin an inquiry into the attack, Mr. Chamisa said. Nor has the government said anything about the incident, which sent him to a hospital with severe head injuries.

Some opposition figures and civic advocates say they believe that the government’s tactics will backfire, drawing more international condemnation and leaching away the support from neighboring governments that is seen as critical to Mr. Mugabe’s government. And in fact, Mr. Mugabe’s threat to “bash” dissidents drew a mild rebuke this week from South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, who told The Financial Times that African leaders were dismayed by photographs of bloodied and beaten protesters.

For the present, however, the effect of the attacks has been to terrorize the government’s critics, some of whom have gone into hiding, changed their mobile telephone numbers or simply fallen silent.

“The regime does not any longer believe that there is a civil society that should participate in politics,” said Tungamirai Madzokere, a ward leader for the Combined Harare Residents Association in Glenview. “They’re now after everyone.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: In Zimbabwe, an Embattled Government Responds to Political Unrest With Violence. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe